ELK Stack allows users to take data from any source, any format to search, analyze and visualize the data in real-time. The ELK is a phrase for three popular open-source projects – Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. You can search all the logs in a single place.
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Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. Basically, elasticsearch supports various languages, high performance, and schema-free JSON documents.
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Logstash is an open-source data consuming tool. Logstash allows you to collect data from a variety of sources, modify it, and pass it on to your desired destination with pre-built filters.
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Finally, Kibana is a data visualization and exploration tool used for reviewing logs and events.
What exactly is Beats?
Beats is a lightweight and single-purpose data shipper, so it collects data on the servers and ships it either to elasticsearch or logstash. The following are the libraries of beats:
- FileBeat: Filebeat Monitors the log files or locations that you specify, and collects log events.
- PacketBeat: Packetbeat is a real-time network packet analyzer that you can use with Elasticsearch. So, it provides an application monitoring and performance analytics system.
- MetricBeat: MetricBeat collects metrics from the operating system and from services running on the server.
- WinlogBeat: Winlogbeat is an open-source log collector that ships Windows Event Logs to Elasticsearch or Logstash. and It installs and runs as a Windows service.
Why ELK Stack?
The ELK Stack helps you to create visualizations for application and infrastructure monitoring, faster troubleshooting, and security analytics. You can find multiple servers by connecting logs during a specific period.
A simple but powerful log analysis solution for developers and DevOps engineers. Because at a lower price- one can gain insights into failure diagnosis, application performance, and infrastructure monitoring.
In fact, it fulfills a complete need for log analytics while IT infrastructure is moving to various clouds, Log management and analytics solutions keep track of this infrastructure and any server and application logs.
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